If English wasn’t your first language, maybe if you learned English later in life, were there any words that you had a really hard time learning how to pronounce? Do you think that had to do with the sounds made in your first language?
There are words I really
hatestruggle with…
Whirl, macabre, dairy, faux, chique.So mostly
you hateFrench :)They just need to write what the heck they meant to say. :D
For some reason I always trip up when saying “I appreciate it”
I feel like a lot of people just drop the “I a” and say “'preciate it!”, lol
(That’s assuming you’re using it like “thank you”, and aren’t just starting a sentence)
Words starting with th- (th-fronting) and plurals ending in -ths, -sps, etc.
Ask a German to pronounce “squirrel.”
The delightful thing is that it works in reverse also: ask a native English speaker to pronounce “Eichhörnchen.”
Eye-ch-urn-ken?
Irish and we have that gutteral Ch sound in Irish so I feel like it’s a cheat code for us.
he last is more -chun
None of those ch’s are guttural and you skipped an h;)
So… eye-ch-churn-chen?
First bit like Ike (edit: or Reich)
The ch digraph in both instances of Eichhörnchen is pronounced closer to the way you pronounce the first consonant in the word “hue”. It’s closer to the front of the mouth than the one you’re thinking of in Irish. It’s ç in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It’s a different sound than the other way that ch is pronounced in German and has to do with what sounds/letters appear around it. The other pronunciation of ch in German is normally pronounced as x (this sound is the one you’re thinking of that’s in Irish) or χ.
That’s really clear, thanks. I learned a lot, including learning that I should not try to pronounce Eichhörnchen. :)
Or a French person.
What’s the problem with Skouirrelle? :^)
Or a person
Is it tricky? English is my first language and it doesn’t seem difficult to me, but I never gave it much thought. So fascinating.
It only has a single vowel, which is an r-coloured vowel…which most languages don’t have. For that matter, many languages don’t even have our “r” sound, so colouring a vowel with “r” is incredibly hard when you don’t even have that consonant to colour with!
Not to mention that after using that r-coloured vowel, you have a semi-syllabic L immediately afterwards. (Is squirrel one syllable or two? Depends on who you ask I guess!). As you may know, L and R are the same in some languages. And even if a language has both AND pronounces them the same ways as English (not necessarily common), they might not allow an L to follow an R! (Just like how we don’t allow R to follow an L)
Oh, and which vowel are we colouring? “i” or the “short I”. This is a very rare vowel, following a third dimension (tenseness) that the majority of other vowels don’t use. Not common in other languages, either!
So that’s the last two sounds.
The first three is a consonant cluster containing another uncommon consonant (w). And even ignoring that, s and k can’t always be combined together in other languages.
So literally every sound in the word “squirrel” has something foreign and rare about it to many languages immediately as you start to get past that “s” sound. Brutal.
It’s not the trickiest, but it’s not exactly easy to say it like the native speakers.
This one’s actually funny to me. It’s a bit of a meme that francophones struggle with squirrel and anglophones struggle with écureuil, but I personally had no trouble with it. You just have to hear it once.
My francophone wife practiced saying squirrel for like 7 years before she was able to get it kinda right, so that’s very impressive if true. It doesn’t help that in my accent, it’s pronounced as one syllable. Even good approximations of the pronunciation that I’ve heard by French speakers are usually done in two syllables.
Ends up as “skwiwwl” for me every time…
Sheet / Sheep / Shit / Ship
Idea. Still not sure if I rponounce the “ea” correctly…
eye-dee-uh
It was I, Dia.
None of them, English is an amazing language. I pronounce stuff like a bro.
Caveat
It gets easier if you understand that it’s a latin word, not english
I struggled with that as a native english speaker at first
But now I realize the correct pronunciation sounds super cool
My friend has a hard time pronouncing ‘teeth’. Just comes out sounding like ‘tits’
I’d suggest “choppers” but it would probably come out “knockers.”
[the]
When I was younger it was any word where an R is followed by an L. Girl, world, twirl… im better at them now tho
I know a kid who can’t say these either but I didn’t put together what it was before.
I wouldn’t say struggle, but I did wonder for a while how to pronounce “anemone”.
I was listening to a best-selling author’s recent audiobook, and the professional voice actress messed this one up. So you’re in good company. Really, who can we blame but the Greeks?
That sounds like a universal truth if I ever heard one.
Everyone has trouble with that one. There’s even a joke about it in Finding Nemo. I don’t imagine most English-speakers can spell it offhand.
I’m having a whole cognitive dissonance moment because I could’ve sworn it was “anenome”. I even studied this in college and have an ecology degree. Likely over the last twenty years I convinced myself that the common incorrect pronunciation is correct, but I immediately looked it up and then tried to rationalize that it was some sort of mandala effect. The simplest answer is that it’s confabulation on my part, and I’m wrong.
I think I was just pronouncing everything wrong for the first several years I was speaking English because I learnt English from books and never heard most words out loud. But I don’t remember anything being physically difficult to pronounce in terms of emulating how it’s said when I first hear it pronounced “correctly”.
Don’t feel bad, everyone. English pronunciation IS difficult, though through tough thorough thought, you can do it!
You must say this out loud as an affirmation.
“Lapel” was an interesting find. That and “development” really hammered in the importance of accentuation. I’m still unsure of what I want to do with “schedule”. “Burger” sometimes sounds off when I say it.
Schedule depends on where you’d like to blend into. You’ve got:
- skedjuhl
- sked-juul
- shed-juul
- shedj-yuu-uhl
- skedj-yuu-uhl
Possibly more! I think the ones with two syllables sound most common/least specific to a dialect. SK is more American and SH is more UK.
